No doubt the literary world is anxiously awaiting the promised sequel to my mini essay on Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare. I discussed briefly there Johnson's defense of Shakespeare for having violated the "dramatic unities"—the idea that, in a play, the elapsed real time while the audience watches in the theater must match the elapsed time depicted in the stage action. Shakespeare obviously cared nothing for this dictum. In Othello, for example, the action begins in Venice and then shifts to Cyprus, at the other end of the Mediterranean, where the same leading characters reconvene. It is today about a 3-hour flight from Italy to Cyprus, so several hundred years ago the journey could not have been achieved while an audience took in the action of the play. In Shakespeare's history plays, of course, wars are begun and ended within the same drama. We are not supposed to believe that Macbeth killed Duncan and then was killed himself around three hours later. According to the theory of the "unities," the theater experience is diminished by these obvious corruptions of "reality."
I did not mention that Johnson takes up the question of whether Shakespeare was even aware of violating theater convention:
Whether Shakespeare knew the unities and rejected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to enquire. We may reasonably suppose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars and criticks, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by chance. [The word "want" is here a synonym for "lack"—Johnson is saying Shakespeare likely received the conventional advice of "experts" and rejected it.]
This is interesting to me mainly for the suggestion relating to Shakespeare's character and private views. The suggestion is of the impatience of a professional practitioner for the theories of "scholars and criticks." He knew what worked, at least for him (and his audience). He wouldn't have wanted to discuss the question. He had no time for that—too busy—and would just have ignored the advice.
This suggestion, admittedly slight, lines up pretty well with several other small details Johnson has gleaned from his reading of Shakespeare. Here he is criticizing Shakespeare for what we might call general sloppiness:
The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very slight consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design. He omits opportunities of instructing or delighting which the train of his story seems to force upon him, and apparently rejects those exhibitions which would be more affecting, for the sake of those which are more easy.
It may be observed, that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and, in view of his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.
If we can put aside the tendency either to concur or disagree, and just allow that Johnson might be on to something, it seems worth noting that there comes into view a picture of a man with much to do and not enough hours to do it in. It is easy to imagine such a man being impatient with the learned views of theoreticians about matters on which he, without formal education or privileged background, had built a busy and successful professional career. Johnson, in a mode still generally critical, then observes:
I am indeed far from thinking, that his works were wrought to his own ideas of perfection; when they were such as would satisfy the audience, they satisfied the writer . . . .
It does not appear, that Shakespeare thought his works worthy of posterity, that he levied any ideal tribute upon future times, or had any further prospect, than of present popularity and present profit. When his plays had been acted, his hope was at an end . . . .
So careless was this great poet of future fame, that, though he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the vale of years, before he could be disgusted with fatigue, or disabled by infirmity, he made no collection of his works, nor desired to rescue those that had already been published from the depravations that obscured them, or secure to the rest a better destiny, by giving them to the world in their genuine state.
Of the plays which bear the name of Shakespeare in the late editions, the greater part were not published till about seven years after his death, and the few which appeared in his life are apparently thrust into the world without the care of the authour, and therefore probably without his knowledge.
It seems Shakespeare just didn't care about the things we contemporary people think an author must care about. He didn't care about the "unities," sure, and he also didn't care that his plays weren’t as good as he might have made them, if he'd had more time and fewer obligations, or that there was no published collection of his plays, with the text as he had originally written it, that would project into the future his genius. He was a professional theater person who had begun as an actor, had acquired an ownership interest in an acting company and, eventually, the theater in which they performed, and by the way was simultaneously supplying this company, from about 1590 to 1610, with one or two new plays per year in order to attract the public to their theater. He pursued these activities in London while keeping a family and a big house back in his hometown of Stratford-on-Avon, about a hundred miles away. The plays, widely regarded as among the greatest works of the world's literature, as they encompass everything that humans have thought or felt, and express it memorably, were pretty clearly regarded by their author as nothing too special, just one facet of his professional activity in the theater biz. He made a good living at it.
Comments